22.6.08

SqueezeCenter 7

Written in the mid-afternoon

I’ve been slowly pushing upgrades through my NetBSD machines and recently upgraded the “music server” that runs SlimServer to power my SqueezeBoxen. That brought a new version of Perl on the machine, which made SlimServer unhappy — it wouldn’t start anymore. I tried to rerun the little script that downloads the “blessed” versions of various CPAN packages from Slim Devices, but the files needed for my trusty old 6.2.1 version were no longer available on their server.

Well, I can’t live without the SqueezeBoxen so an emergency update was needed. (more…)

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Muista ladata Firefox 3 tänään! Ennätyskampanja alkaa klo 20.

1.6.08

Search tweaks

Written at evening time

Some time ago I added some UTF-8 pages to this site. I promptly started receiving one error message per page from the Swish-e search engine I’m using. Of course, the search results also showed “garbage” since Swish-e only handles single byte characters.

Today I got tired of the errors arriving in my mailbox, so I dug into the code and fixed things. (more…)

6.12.07

Hiding from spammers

Written at lunch time • Tags:

For a long time now I’ve removed the generator meta tag from all WordPress installations I’ve setup. Mentioning WordPress is just honey for the bees. Since I removed the meta tags the amount of spam has decreased remarkably. Posts about WordPress are targeted much sooner and for much longer than other posts.

Starting with WordPress 2.4 the generator information is inserted by the core code, as opposed to the theme. This means that the meta tag will reappear even if you have removed it from your theme. However, this is actually a good change, because now you can disable the tag not only from the HTML pages generated by the theme, but also from all other formats WordPress outputs. The information is created by a couple of functions centrally instead of scattered instances through the code.

I’ve created a plugin to accomplish this: No Generator works with the trunk code from svn, and will work with 2.4 once it is released.

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Version 3.0 of the DoFollow plugin can differentiate between comments left by registered users and other visitors. (more…) (4)
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One of the recent posts has been showing up as new over and over again on feed readers. I narrowed the problem down to the email address obfuscation in Markdown & Extra. I just upgraded to a more recent version (two new versions had come out since the beginning of December), and one of the changes is that the obfuscation algorithm is now deterministic instead of random. So you should see that article pop up once more as new, if you are reading through the feed, and then never again.
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I just completed testing my plugins with WordPress 2.1-alpha3 and they all work correctly. This should mean that it is safe to continue using them with WordPress 2.1, once it is released.

2.12.06

Multibyte Mail for WordPress

Written in the mid-afternoon • Tags:

The Multibyte Mail plugin replaces the wp_mail() function with one that tries to encode the usual email message headers that might contain 8-bit data. It should work well with the core WordPress code as well as any plugins, unless the plugin is sending out some unusual headers.

If you receive bounces for comments on articles with 8-bit (or multibyte) characters in their title (or in the name of the comment author), this plugin should prove helpful. (more…)

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I’ve had a number of ideas on articles for this blog, but a) I didn’t write them down and b) the ideas didn’t choose to occur at times when I’d be idling by a keyboard… I’ve started a new section in my task management software to try and keep such ideas alive for the future.
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SourceForge has improved their CVS infrastructure. Instead of checking out all of pkgsrc-wip from scratch, you could just fix the already checked out tree. (more…)

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